Leopold’s high-leverage, high-stakes bet
#SNDK #MU #美光科技 Last Friday, about $96 million in short-term call options poured into four AI chip stocks—SanDisk, Micron, Intel, and Marvel. During the day, SanDisk surged by as much as about 11%.
This former OpenAI researcher has founded an AI-themed fund again and started making a major bet of roughly $96 million. He concentrated purchases of short-term call options on four AI chip stocks—SanDisk, Micron, Intel, and Marvel. The premiums for each underlying were about $44 million for Micron and about $41 million for SanDisk. The options expire on October 2, and before expiration all of these premiums will be wiped out. So far, there are only two weeks left. His position and these are the premiums he paid—he basically can’t afford any wrong decisions. Any error would cause his more than $90 million in premiums to vanish by October 2.
October 2 is the second day after Micron’s earnings report, so he’s essentially betting that storage will have a major breakout in the next earnings quarter. SanDisk is bought on a mark-to-market basis at about par, while the others still have some degree of out-of-the-money.
These extremely short-term, extremely high-leverage call options indicate that he expects a very strong burst from storage in the near term. Based on his margin, the amount of capital being moved is about 11 times the funds currently deployed. His delta averages around 0.4, so his leverage is nearly 10x, plus some additional credit lines provided by the bank.